Bartlett hits sequestration uproar

Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett is not exactly toeing the party line when it comes to this winter’s threat of looming, across-the-board restrictions in military spending.

A senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, Bartlett says the uproar among his GOP colleagues over the potential cuts amounts to what some would describe “as a hysteria parade.”

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“We need to have a national dialogue on this,” Bartlett said in an interview Wednesday.. “We need to stop being so partisan on this. We need to stop dramatizing the thing.”

This stance puts Bartlett a world apart from others on the Armed Services Committee – especially its chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) who’s emerged as one of the top critics of the potential cuts to defense spending and has been no stranger to dramatization.

From “doomsday mechanism” to “time bomb,” McKeon has denounced the cuts in the harshest possible terms, saying they would hollow out the military. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls them “a nutty, meat-ax approach” and has likened it to “shooting ourselves in the head.” At stake is an automatic, across-the-board “sequester” of $500 billion in Pentagon budget growth over the next decade, set to take effect Jan. 2 unless Congress averts it.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for a plan to stave off sequestration, but Democrats and Republicans have been gridlocked on several key issues, including whether tax hikes should be included as part of a deal to avert the automatic cuts.

“I think there is a general resignation that we’re not going to get rid of [sequestration],” Bartlett told POLITICO. “The question now is, do we apply it rationally or stupidly?”

He acknowledged it would be nearly impossible to apply across-the-board cuts to nearly every account in the Pentagon budget, noting that such an endeavor would require the Defense Department to renegotiate more than 2,500 contracts. “You can’t do that,” he said. “The Pentagon would grind to a halt.”

“If we do it the way the law is written," he added, "it will be totally devastating.”

Bartlett said he expects that instead, the White House ultimately will propose an alternate budget for the next fiscal year – one that would reduce military spending by about 10 percent, the amount required under last year’s law that mandated sequestration.

He declined to say whether he’d support such a plan, explaining that he’s open to a discussion about the proper size of the Defense Department.

“The average American out there, by big percentages, wants to cut defense by twice the sequester amount,” he said, citing recent polls.

“We need to stop with all the superlatives about the thing and be rational about it and involve the American people on it,” Bartlett said. “It’s their country. It’s their kids that will have to fight the next war. They have a right to be involved, don’t they?”